Research

Research Interests

  • Linguistic phylogenetics
  • Quantitative typology and spatial modeling
  • Diachronic phonology and prosody

Research Experience

  • 2025: Research Assistant to Prof. Brent Vine, Department of Classics, UCLA
  • 2023–present: Research Assistant to Prof. David Goldstein, Department of Linguistics, UCLA

Publications

Articles

    • In Prep. “From Points to Polygons: Modeling Spatial Autocorrelation.” (with David Goldstein)
    • In Prep. “Young Infants’ Discrimination of Phonetic Contrasts Predicts their Typological Frequency.” (with Megha Sundara)
    • Forth. “Re-evaluating the Word-Medial Operation of the Saussure-Hirt Effect in Greek.” Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Ancient Greek Linguistics.
    • Forthcoming: “Gk. μοιχός ‘adulterer’: Re-mixing a piss-poor etymology”, Proceedings of the 35th Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference.
    • 2023: “Gendered Language in Aristophanes’ ‘Birds.’” in Persephone: The Harvard Undergraduate Classics Journal Vol. 8.1 (Spring 2023): 12-29.
    • 2023: “Between Need, Want, Material and Innate Beauty: Tracing Shades of Erōs.” in Corvus Vol. 13 (Spring 2023): 27-35.
    • 2023: “Mind your Language Mister! A Case Study in Aristophanic Humor.“ in Animus: University of Chicago Classical Journal Vol. 3.1 (Winter 2023): 36-51.
    • 2021. “The Estuarine Ecological Knowledge Network: Future Prospects.” (with Grant S. McCall, Russell Greaves, Brian Hitchcock, Brian Ostahowski, and Sherman W. Horn III.) Marine Technology and Science Journal 55 (3):122–123.

Presentations

 

  • 2026. “From points to polygons: Modeling spatial autocorrelation.” (with David Goldstein) Special workshop on “The geography of linguistic evolution”, EVOLANG XVI, Apr. 7.
  • 2026. “Lexical stress and syllable weight in Hindi-Urdu pop text-setting.” (with Jahnavi Narkar and Dhanya Charan) Linguistics Society of America Annual Meeting, Jan. 9.
  • 2025. “Investigating lexical stress in Hindi-Urdu pop music.” (with Jahnavi Narkar and Dhanya Charan) Sixth Joint Meeting of Acoustical Society of America and Acoustical Society of Japan, Dec. 5.
  • 2025. “The development of word-final stops in Hittite.” AnatoLinks, University of Oxford, Dec. 4.
  • 2025. “Synchronic phonetic variation drives diachronic sound change: Further evidence from
    pre-nasal raising in Young Avestan.” 7th Edinburgh Symposium on Historical Phonology, Dec. 2.
  • Oct, 2025: Converging computational evidence against an East-Germanic clade (with Sean Liu and Marc Canby). WeCIEC 36: Annual UCLA Indo–European Conference
  • Aug, 2025: Issues of lexical cognacy encoding in IE-CoR (with Tom Francis, Klaus Kim, and Laura McLean). International Conference on Historical Linguistics 27
  • July 9, 2025: Population size has a weak effect on phoneme inventory size. LSA Summer Institute, Poster Session.
  • July 3, 2025: Origins and nature of food vocabulary in English. Classics 185: Origins and Nature of English Vocabulary, UCLA
  • June, 2025: Re-evaluating the word-medial operation of the Saussure-Hirt effect in Greek. International Conference on Ancient Greek Linguistics
  • April, 2025: Word-final voicing in Hittite? Southern California Annual Meeting on Phonology
  • October, 2024: “Re-mixing a piss-poor etymology: on Gk. μοιχός and OE (ge)māh” WeCIEC 35: Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference
  • July 11, 2024: “Karma is the breeze in my hair on the weekend: Sanskrit loanwords into English” Classics 185: Origins and Nature of English Vocabulary, UCLA
  • June 28, 2024: “Towards an integrative approach to the investigation of linguistic phylogenies” 5th Munich-UCLA Historical Linguistics Colloquium (Presentation Materials available here)
  • May 29, 2024: “FSAs, FSTs and sequence alignment in phylogenetic studies: The case of Tocharian B” UCLA Program in Indo-European Studies Graduate Seminar

Courses

  • 2026. Teaching Assistant for CLS 52: Greco-Roman Technologies: Materials, Monuments, Machines (Instructor of Record: Prof Sarah Beckmann)
  • 2025. Teaching Assistant for CLS 51: Art and Archaeology of Ancient Greece (Instructor of Record: Prof. John Papadopoulos)
  • Summer 2025: Instructor of Record for Historical Linguistics (LING-110), UCLA
  • Spring 2025: Teaching Assistant for Introduction to Linguistic Analysis (LING-20), UCLA— Faculty Supervisor: Professor Anoop Mahajan
  • Spring 2025: Undergraduate supervisor for LING-197 (Infants’ discrimination of phonetic contrasts), UCLA— Faculty Supervisor: Professor Megha Sundara
  • Winter 2025: Teaching Assistant for Introduction to Linguistic Analysis (LING-20), UCLA— Faculty Supervisor: Professor Ben Eischens
  • Fall 2024: Teaching Assistant for Introduction to Historical Linguistics (LING-110), UCLA— Faculty Supervisor: Professor David Goldstein
  • Summer 2024: Teaching Assistant for Introduction to the Study of Language (LING-1), UCLA— Faculty Supervisor: Corrina Fuller
  • Fall 2021: Instructor of Record for Urdu (ALS-100), Grinnell College

Awards

 

  • 2025: UCLA Graduate Summer Research Mentorship
  • 2024 & 2025: Morvarid Guiv Fellowship in Zoroastrian Studies
  • 2024: UCLA/Keck Humanistic Research Inquiry Award
  • 2024: UCLA Graduate Summer Research Mentorship
  • 2023–2024: Institute for the Study of Global Antiquity Graduate Fellowship
  • 2022–2023: Joan Palevsky Chair Post-Baccalaureate Scholarship in Classics
  • 2022: CAMWS Award for Outstanding Accomplishment in Classical Studies
  • 2022: Gus and Elfie Kalfass Prize for Excellence in German Studies
  • 2021: Gerald W. LaLonde Fellowship in Classical Studies
  • 2021: UC Berkeley Intensive Greek Workshop Tuition Rebate
  • 2019: Institute for Global Engagement Summer Language Study Scholarship